Saturday, March 31, 2012

Delric Miller IV died in a hail of bullets a month ago. When someone fired 37 AK-47 rounds into his Detroit home at 4:30 a.m., he was mortally wounded while dozing on the couch. He was nine months old. No one made the multicolored teething ring he got for Christmas or his toy hammer into a national symbol of random violence.

Last year, Charinez Jefferson, 17, was shot and killed on a Chicago street. "She begged the shooter not to shoot her because she was pregnant," a pastor explained. The alleged assailant, Timothy Jones, 18, shot her in the head, chest and back after seeing her walking with a rival gang member. New York Times columnist Charles Blow did not write a column about Jefferson's killing as a symbol of the perils of being a young black woman in America.

Last June, a stray bullet from a confrontation on a Brighton Beach, N.Y., boardwalk killed 16-year-old Tysha Jones as she sat on a bench. A 19-year-old man, out for revenge after an earlier scuffle on the boardwalk, was charged in the shooting. Tysha's heartbroken mother was not featured on all the national TV shows.

In January, 12-year-old Kade'jah Davis was shot and killed when, allegedly, 19-year-old Joshua Brown showed up at her Detroit house to demand the return of a cellphone from Davis’ mother. When Brown didn't get the phone, he fired shots through the front door. No one held high-profile street protests to denounce gunplay over such trifles....

An allegedly racially motivated killing, though, gins up the outrage machine in a way the routine murder of young blacks doesn't....

In America, the lives of young black people are cheap, unless they happen to fit the right agenda.

You know what's one huge difference is between the Zimmerman killing and every killing Lowry lists?

It's simple: In every case Lowry lists, everyone in America acknowledges that a crime has been committed. No one questions the notion that these killers should be arrested and tried. No one thinks the law protects the killers -- no one thinks the law ought to.

There's more beyond this. Liberals would like to see more economic opportunity for America's have-nots, and a reduction in easy access to guns. Liberals believe that personal responsibility plays a huge part, but that societal conditions do also.

8 comments:

The evil dishonesty of the right knows no bounds, does it? Add to everything else that we know that Lowry doesn't care about ANY of the deaths he Googled 10 minutes before he started writing. No right-winger does, except as a weapon against Obama and liberals. Liberals actually want fewer people to die violently.

If the police had patted the killers mentioned in Lowrey's article on the head and told them, in effect, "job well done," and released them without so much as an investigation, of course they would have been huge national scandals.

The reason they *weren't* huge national scandals isn't because they "don't fit an agenda," but because in every case, the police responded the way we expect them to.

Lowrey, and ignorant and mendacious as he is, clearly understands this. But he'd rather push the theory that the concern about Trayvon Martin is unwarranted, and evidence that liberals really only pretend to care about the injustice in his case as a means to agitate for anti-white, racial conflict.

There was sort of a parallel piece in Thursday's Chronicle--not pushing a right-wing line as such (Chip Johnson is pretty Lawn Order for the Bay Area, but he's not a National Review wingnut), but lamenting the fact that "local churches and activists [are] gearing up, determined to do something about a killing so far away, and seemingly oblivious to the near-daily tragedies occurring in their own city". Which is just stunningly clueless.

You see that a lot with wingnuts. "How come you're upset about this but not about that?"

What took the cake for me was a post one of my FB friends posted about someone decrying the alleged execution of a former Muslim turned Christian pastor in Iran and why weren't President Obama, Al Sharpton and Gloria Allred weren't condemning it.

It took me less than five minutes to find out that (1) the pastor had not been executed, though I would agree that he has done nothing wrong and should be a free man, and (2) that the White House had condemned Iran's treatment of the man.

Even so, we don't really have any control over what happens in Iran, but we have the chance to make more of a positive difference here in our own country.

Here's the story Fox cites (from the L.A. Times), and a fuller version of what Jesse Jackson said:

He added: "Blacks are under attack." African American families are facing record home foreclosures and unemployment. Their children are burdened with student loan debt. States, particularly conservative ones, are passing voter laws that leaders know will disenfranchise blacks and other minorities. Meanwhile, the nation's prisons are brimming with black faces, he said, and their numbers that suggest that the legal system is quicker to send blacks to prison than whites.

You could argue with racializing the first two. The latter two? Sorry, those are aimed at blacks specifically.

Oh, and there was also this:

Jackson said gunfire in America continues to be a problem for all Americans -- not just blacks. Why, he asked, isn't America outraged, that far more people die of gun violence in one year in America than the number of soldiers killed in the wars waged in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Thanks Steve for making about the same observation as I did regarding Mr. Lowry's misguided column. I'd like to suggest that you and others post comments directly to his National Review site, as I did. This way, Lowry's misguided supporters can benefit from a little insight, which is lacking from the comments offered there so far. http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/294962/murders-don-t-count-rich-lowry